A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

In a sort of convergence of two issues I’ve been covering lately, last month, a SWAT team conducted a heavy-handed raid of an underground poker room in Dallas. The SWAT team brought along a camera crew from the A&E reality show Dallas SWAT to record the action. This was no Sopranos-style game where everybody’s packing. It was a well-known, advertised, gray-area gathering of poker fans. The Pokerati blog has more details.

For posterity, here’s a photo of the Dallas SWAT team. This is what they brought to crack down on a group of people playing cards. The Pokerati blog says the SWAT team brought computer-generated maps that looked to be specific to poker rooms, indicating that this is likely the first of many such raids.

And it isn’t the first time. SWAT teams have also been breaking up underground games in New York City. They’ve even been used to raid charity poker games in Baltimore, Denver, and all over the state of Ohio.

In my home state of Virginia, a SWAT team shot and killed unarmed Sal Culosi last January. They had come to arrest the optometrist for the crime of betting on sports games with friends. And in 1998, a SWAT team on a gambling raid in Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reid, who was in a car reading a book, and mistook the police officers for burglars (the club he was guarding had been robbed months earlier).